DevOps skills in 2023

Today lets look at the DevOps career map!

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DevOps Map

Learning DevOps

To start with you would normal come from an infrastructure or developer background. See this article about starting a career in DevOps

You can also move towards devOps from a QA role too.

Leveling up

A DevOps engineer must know how to use various automation tools used in continuous integration and deployment pipelines. This means knowing how to setup a CI/CD server like Jenkins, creating and maintaining pipelines in Jenkins or other CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions or AWS Code Pipeline.

Platform Engineer

Expanding on your knowledge is key to progressing with a career in DevOps. The areas of knowledge expected on a platform are

  • Security Specialist - Providing specialist advise about the current and latest security information. This includes providing best practice to avoid data loss and bad actor breaches, as well as scanning for vulnerabilities and dependency injection attacks.
  • Telemetry Specialist - Metrics and logging is required to ensure the platform runs smoothly. The developers and QA/Testers will also rely on the logging information to help diagnose and debug issues with apps running on the platform. An expertise will capturing and storing, including searching and graphing data is required to enable a platform and the applications running on it, so stay in check.
  • Build and Deploy - Helping the Developers to build solid pipelines to build, test and deploy the applications to the platform. Advise about how to fix failing builds, and providing a golden path where tried and tested routes to production will give a cleaner and efficient route to the developers.
  • Integration Specialist - The platform does not exist in isolation, so various tools, systems and access must be catered for. Understanding the integration between these systems is required to get the best from the automation systems. How does LDAP inteface with google docs or JIRA?
  • Architect - New technologies are being created all the time. This role specialises in checking out and evaluating the new stuff, understanding how it can add value, and then designing changes to the systems and platform to take advantage.

What next?

You want to earn more money? There are still two options left,

  • Management - If you like and get on with people, maybe you can help steer their work lives.
  • or Contracting - Get involved in shorter and varied projects. Get paid for your expertise (6+ years), and be able to steer a project from the beginning or where it has got stuck.

I specialise in the I.T contracting in UK, especially those roles found in an Agile Software development team.

Come ask me and the community questions. You can find me on Slack.

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